Leveraging Data Partnerships in BFSI to Build Privacy-First Customer Experiences

In the fast-evolving banking landscape, customer data is one of the most valuable strategic assets. Just a few years ago, the idea of sharing customer data across organizations was met with skepticism and fear due to concerns over privacy, security, and competitive risks. Today, that mindset is changing—not because the risks have disappeared but because frameworks and technology have emerged to mitigate them.

Forward-looking banks and insurers recognize that strategic collaboration can unlock value that no single institution can achieve alone. In fact, sharing data—even with industry peers or partners—is now seen as essential for tackling challenges like risk management, personalization, and access to underserved customer segments.

This was the focus of the recent webinar, “Data Partnerships in BFSI—A Strategic Playbook for Building Privacy-First Customer Experiences,” in which Pavel Schamberger, an expert in analytics and risk in the financial sector, shared hard-earned lessons on how data partnerships are transforming financial services delivery in Southeast Asia.

Here are the key takeaways, grounded in real-world examples and practical insights for BFSI leaders.

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Strategic Value of Data Partnerships

Data partnerships, when designed and executed well, unlock multiple layers of strategic value for BFSI institutions:

• Hyper-personalization at scale: Combine internal and partner data to gain a complete view of customer behavior, enabling contextual, relevant offers across channels.
• Improved credit scoring and financial inclusion: Use alternative data (e.g., telco or utility signals) to responsibly assess creditworthiness for underbanked or unbanked populations.
• Faster onboarding and KYC efficiency: Leverage verified partner data to reduce friction in compliance processes and accelerate customer onboarding.
• New revenue streams: Distribute financial products through partner platforms (embedded finance) and monetize aggregated insights (ethically and with consent).
• Customer retention and ecosystem positioning: Stay embedded in the customer’s everyday life through partnerships with lifestyle, commerce, or telco brands, making your brand harder to replace.

Use Cases for Data Collaboration in BFSI

Embedded Finance & Contextual Personalization

The rise of embedded finance is reshaping how financial products are distributed across Southeast Asia. The trend is to offer financial services—loans, insurance, payments—directly within platforms customers already use daily.

Whether in a retail app, ride-hailing platform, or e-commerce checkout, customers expect financial services to be integrated into their digital experiences. To deliver this, banks bring financial infrastructure, while partners with large user bases contribute consented behavioral data, enabling pre-qualification and personalized offers.

Such partnerships also hold potential for streamlining KYC (Know Your Customer) processes. Verified behavioral data from a partner platform can help validate user activity or auto-fill onboarding steps, improving compliance and reducing friction.

Credit Scoring with Telco Data

Pavel Schamberger shared a compelling real-world example from his experience working with telco data to improve credit scoring.

In markets where credit bureau coverage is limited and millions rely on prepaid SIM cards, telco behavior—such as top-up frequency, SIM tenure, and usage consistency—can offer reliable proxies for creditworthiness.

Using machine learning, this data was used to evaluate risk for customers with no formal credit history responsibly. It opened the door to offering financial services—like loans—to underbanked users at scale in a way that was both inclusive and compliant.

Key Challenges in BFSI Data Sharing

While the potential is enormous, BFSI data partnerships come with real challenges:

• Trust & Competitive Concerns: Institutions worry about data misuse or customer poaching. Clear governance frameworks, legal agreements, and role-based access are critical to building confidence.
• Regulatory Friction: SEA’s privacy laws vary by country. Staying compliant requires careful consent management, data localization, and jurisdiction-specific data-handling practices.
• Identity Fragmentation: Without common identifiers, linking customer records across systems is difficult. Reliable identity resolution (via a CDP or similar platform) is essential for accurate personalization.
• Technical Barriers: Legacy systems and incompatible data formats can slow down integration. The key is to invest in flexible, API-driven infrastructure and automated data transformation.

These challenges are real but solvable. The right strategy, tools, and partner alignment make possible secure, privacy-first data collaboration.

Getting the Data Right: Clean, Consent-Driven, and Connected

The success of any data partnership relies on data quality. Scoring models, personalization, and activation all depend on clean, consistent, and connected customer data.

Data exchanged between partners is often incomplete, inconsistent, or contains duplicates. To make it usable, BFSI organizations need to:

• Clean and normalize data for consistency
• Resolve identities across systems and devices

A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is invaluable in this process. It helps collect and clean data from multiple sources, unify data into single customer view, resolve customer identities across devices and sources, and ensures only consented data is activated.

In regulated BFSI environments, CDPs that support private deployments (on-premise or private cloud) are especially important. This enables complete compliance with data residency and governance policies while allowing for data processing and activation agility.

Why BFSI Leaders Must Act Now

BFSI landscape is evolving fast. Embedded finance, open ecosystems, and rising digital expectations are shifting how customers interact with financial services. Institutions that act now—building trust-based, privacy-first data partnerships—will gain:

• Deeper customer insights
• Broader access to underbanked markets
• New revenue through partner distribution
• Stronger retention in a platform-based economy

But this is not just a technology problem—it’s a mindset shift. The leaders in this space are those who treat data as a shared asset and adopt tools that empower both marketing and IT.

Ready to Build Smarter Data Partnerships?

If your organization is exploring how to unify customer data, activate it securely, and enable privacy-first personalization across channels, a composable CDP like Meiro can help.

With private deployments across 100+ countries, advanced identity resolution, and a powerful no-code segmentation and campaign orchestration suite, Meiro Customer Data and Experience Hub gives banks the ability to unify, enrich, and activate customer data without compromising security and compliance.